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This is why you are on the very same side as all the evil in the world

Critical Game Design
Installation
2026

The cultures that produce authoritarian leaders are the same cultures that formed the rest of us, and their attacks run on a logic already installed in almost everyone: I have to protect myself, or others will harm me. Under the scarcity and competition the system creates, that logic is not a moral failure but a survival skill. Basic necessities are not reliably accessible; people compete with each other for their lives. In that world, protecting what you have — your money, your space, your
position, your peace — is simply the intelligent thing to do.
Once self-protection is the intelligent thing to do for everyone, the leader who protects his own power is no longer surprising. He is only doing what we do, at a scale we do not have. "This is why you are on the very same side as all the evil in the world" works in the gap this opens: the distance between the better decisions we demand from powers we cannot reach, and the self-protective decisions we make in the daily situations where we do have agency — where no one is watching, and where the cost of acting on our stated values would fall on us. Most people hold good values and find them nearly impossible to practise under systemic pressure. That cognitive dissonance is not a private inconsistency; it is the mechanism by which cruelty becomes ordinary, mundane, procedural. We've got to do what we've got to do.

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The project's core claim follows from this: becoming an oppressor is not a question of how many people you have damaged. That number only describes the size of your power. What you did with the power you actually had is the whole question — and everyone has some. The work turns this argument into a choice-based game. The player moves through a series of small, ordinary conflicts and every choice is one between self-protection and repair. Conflict is deliberately placed at the centre. In the logic the piece examines, a conflict is a thing to escape, to close down, to get out of as quickly as possible; the work treats it instead as an unavoidable part of sharing a planet with others, and therefore as the exact site where a different practice can begin. Each decision is followed by a short reflection; a closing recap replays the path the player took and shows what it contributed to.

The game is scrupulous about not rewarding repair. If repair reliably paid off, the work would be teaching that good things happen to good people — and therefore that people with good things must be good, which is the engine of nearly every hierarchy that has ever existed. So the difference between the two choices is never the outcome. It is whether anyone else was in the room when the decision was made. A decision made with someone can be argued with, renegotiated, refused; a decision made about someone and then explained to them can only be accepted or resented. Here it is forty euros and a couch. Somewhere else it is a border. The grammar is identical; the only variable is how many people are downstream of you.

The spatial installation stages the game as a deconstructed arcade machine, in three components: a box with a curtain, a screen, and a button deck. Every time a player chooses repair over self protection, the curtain opens slightly, exposing the inside of the box — the research and references the game is built on. The machine meets the player's vulnerability by becoming vulnerable in return: now you can critique me too.

To change a system, its leverage point has to change. If the ambition is to leave authoritarian power no ground to stand on, the logic it relies on has to stop being normal — and that logic is maintained in ordinary rooms, by ordinary people, all day. This is also where the work locates its hope. The self-protective pattern is not fixed; patterns change through conscious action and repetition, and a different logic, practised often enough, starts running underneath the decision.

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